Some homes and businesses employ zoned radiant heating systems or hydronic heating systems to heat living spaces, pools, spas, walkways and driveways. Hydronic heating systems distribute heated fluid through a series of heat exchanging pipes that are positioned throughout the heating zone. Conventional hydronic systems use on-demand sources, such as boilers and chillers, to thermally adjust fluids that circulate throughout the system.
Hydronic heating systems placed in living spaces may include radiant floor pipes and baseboard mounted or free-standing radiators that transfer heat from a plurality of boilers to the target heating zones. A controller is provided to receive heating request signals from heating zone thermostats. The controller communicates with aquastats, an injection system, fluid circulators and fluid valves to supply heated fluid from the boiler to the selected heating zones. While conventional hydronic heating systems may be coupled to solar heating systems to supplement the boiler heating capacity, existing controllers are not configured to optimize and/or store energy supplied from the solar heating systems. Various other drawbacks exist with these systems and other known systems in the prior art.
Moreover, the expanding interest in these solar hydronic systems has exposed two problems that currently plague the hydronic heating industry: lack of installation expertise and lack of design expertise in these newer complex solar hydronic systems. While hydronic system installers may be found, they often lack the expertise required to design and install these newer solar hydronic systems. Moreover, it is estimated that there are only a few hundred solar hydronic experts located in the United States, those of which are scattered all over the country.
Even though manufactures started to develop mainstream solar hydronic systems for homes or businesses, these manufactures have not addressed the problem that only a small percentage of hydronic heating installers have the training and/or expertise to design solar hydronic systems. The sporadic placement of these few solar hydronic experts often leaves home builders, buyers or architects who want to install a solar hydronic heating system without any reasonable alternatives. Therefore, there exists a need in the industry to simplify the design, configuration and control processes of a hydronic system so as to enable the average hydronic system installer to install and configure these newer, more complex solar hydronic systems.